The Movie Known In Some Circles As Dial Code Santa Claus

Game Over (I'll go with the IMDb title; the original French title is 36.15 Code Pere Noel) (1989)

Runtime: 87 minutes

Directed by: Rene Manzor

Starring: Brigitte Fossey, Louis Ducreux, Patrick Floersheim, Alain Lalanne, Francois-Eric Gendron

From: Several French companies

For shame in me not posting this before Christmas, as I saw the movie a week and a half ago!

I am striking while the iron's hot. Considering the trailer for this French film (under the title Dial Code Santa Claus & presented by the American Genre Film Archive, who are showing it on the big screen in several locations this month, but of course none of them are close to Florida) went viral yesterday and even ended up on Entertainment Weekly's website, I might as well jerry-rig a method where I watch a poor quality version of the film w/ English subtitles that don't always match up to the picture (don't ask for details...) so I could see a movie I have known about for years yet haven't watched until last night.

After all, once you hear the plot description you'll realize why I never forgot about the film. A 10 year old rich kid named Tommy lives in a mansion with his single mother and diabetic, nearly blind grandfather. Tommy loves RAMBO, to the point that he not only does a combined working out and suiting up montage to some weird French Christmas song that sounds a lot like Eye of the Tiger, but even does his own wargames simulation where he pretends he is the Stallone character. If that doesn't sound great enough, via Minitel he communicates with a vagrant that pretends to be Santa Claus...

Actually, I better explain what Minitel is as not even I was too familiar with it until relatively recently. From the 80's all the way to 2012, the French gave everyone terminals that via the telephone line hooked up to various services... phone directories, online stores, train reservations, stock prices, and even the early forms of e-mail and chatrooms. This was done in part to help greatly improve what was a terrible telephone network. The reason why the original French title was 36.15 Code Pere Noel was that 36.11 and up was the prefixes used with Minitel... you'd type in some word after the prefix and in this case, Pere Noel brought you to a site where children could communicate with Santa. Now, I have no idea how Tommy and a vagrant on a public Minitel machine were able to communicate with each other or how this vagrant was able to communicate as Santa from his position, but either the movie was sloppy (and Lord is it ever clumsy at times) or I'll just chalk it up to me not fully understanding how Minitel works. But in either case, Minitel is pretty awesome as it was ahead of its time and only the French ever used such a system on a widespread scale.

Anyway, that communication allowed for this bum to know where Tommy lived and he invades, dressed as Santa. Tommy is starting to not believe in Santa, so he decides to stay up and via cameras connected to his fancy wrist computer, hopes to spot Jolly Saint Nick. Note that Tommy even knows what “decoupling” means and how to perform such a task. Well, “Santa” shows up, kills Tommy's dog, and Tommy decides to try and kill Santa! Naturally, Home Alone comparisons have been made, and funny that this was released before Home Alone... but of course this is far more serious than the film series with Kevin McCallister. Tommy even uses fire and makeshift bombs on fake Saint Nick! That is quite the feat for a child... but most children don't have EPIC MULLETS like our protagonist does here.

As previously mentioned, the movie at times is rather clumsy and that definitely could have been done better. Yet this film (whether you want to call it by its original French title or one of its seemingly half a dozen or so English titles) is so loony, so out there and so dark that even seeing this at home by myself was a fun experience-I can only imagine what a theatrical screening with a rowdy crowd would be like. To add to the insanity, the protagonist (Alain Lalanne) is the director's son and Mr. Lalanne has gone on to contribute to the visual effects on such films as Gravity, The Dark Knight and Avatar... so maybe our mulleted hero was a techno whiz when he was a kid in real life.